Tracing Arbitrary Instructions

You can use the pid provider to trace any instruction in any user function. Upon demand, the pid provider creates a probe for every instruction in a function. The name of each probe is the offset of its corresponding instruction in the function expressed as a hexadecimal integer. To enable a probe that is associated with the instruction at offset 0x1c in function foo of module bar.so in the process with PID 123, use the following command.

# dtrace -n pid123:bar.so:foo:1c

To enable all of the probes in the function foo, including the probe for each instruction, you can use the command:

# dtrace -n pid123:bar.so:foo:

The following example demonstrates how to combine the pid provider with speculative tracing to trace every instruction in a function.

Example 4–4 errorpath.d: Trace User Function Call Error Path

pid$1::$2:entry
{
	self->spec = speculation();
	speculate(self->spec);
	printf("%x %x %x %x %x", arg0, arg1, arg2, arg3, arg4);
}

pid$1::$2:
/self->spec/
{
	speculate(self->spec);
}

pid$1::$2:return
/self->spec && arg1 == 0/
{
	discard(self->spec);
	self->spec = 0;
}

pid$1::$2:return
/self->spec && arg1 != 0/
{
	commit(self->spec);
	self->spec = 0;
}

When errorpath.d executes, the output of the script is similar to the following example.

# ./errorpath.d 100461 _chdir
dtrace: script './errorpath.d' matched 19 probes
CPU     ID                    FUNCTION:NAME
  0  25253                     _chdir:entry 81e08 6d140 ffbfcb20 656c73 0
  0  25253                     _chdir:entry
  0  25269                         _chdir:0
  0  25270                         _chdir:4
  0  25271                         _chdir:8
  0  25272                         _chdir:c
  0  25273                        _chdir:10
  0  25274                        _chdir:14
  0  25275                        _chdir:18
  0  25276                        _chdir:1c
  0  25277                        _chdir:20
  0  25278                        _chdir:24
  0  25279                        _chdir:28
  0  25280                        _chdir:2c
  0  25268                    _chdir:return